How Facilities Leaders Handle Vendor Partnerships, Site Visits, and Hard RFPs

What if the biggest lever in your facilities budget isn’t a new system, but a vendor list you haven’t touched in three years?

At a recent facilities panel, four multi-site operators sat down to talk about what actually changes when the ground keeps shifting under a facilities program: which vendors to keep, which conversations to have monthly instead of never, when to say no to a client, and where the real savings were hiding the whole time.

The panel included Steve Vollrath, Co-Founder of Addilan Group; Donnie Geyer, Director of Maintenance at Bath & Body Works; Jeff Yates, Business Development Manager at iVueit; and Catherine Barnes, VP of Facilities Management at Option Care Health, moderated by Kurt Smith, CEO of Fexa.

What follows is a cleaned-up version of their conversation, edited for length and clarity.

How Do You Lead a Team Through Something You Can’t Control?

Steve Vollrath: It’s certainly been a lot of uncertainty over the last five to seven years, and I think with us at Addilan the mantra is keep calm, and it’s not just a phrase. It’s the idea that we know who we are, we know the value we can bring, and we know our core values. What we need to do is really be partners with our clients and listen to what their needs are. When supply chain issues were a challenge, if we’re being upfront and saying, here’s a long lead time, do we want to wait, is there an alternative, and just paying attention to those details is what’s helped us guide through that period of time.

Donnie Geyer: I try and keep the noise as much away from my team as I can, because they don’t need to worry about that. They can really focus on the stores and that service level. There’s nothing they can do about a vendor that’s going to have to charge an increase on equipment. It doesn’t affect the fact we still have a broken unit or a plumbing problem, so I let us deal with the cost side and let them focus on doing the best they can do.

What Does a Real Vendor Partnership Actually Look Like?

Steve Vollrath: This is really a communication relationship, and we believe communication is the reason for success and failure, and we realize ninety percent of that relies on us. With all of our key clients, we have monthly fifteen to twenty minute calls just to touch base so nothing unravels. We can talk about open work orders, closed work orders, why a cost was what it was. RFPs, I cringe at, honestly, because I don’t want to be a vendor with our clients. I want to be a partner. We’d rather sit on the sideline and wait to know what we can do well and execute on well. And if we can’t do it, I’m not afraid to say, reach out to Jeff, we partner with iVueit all the time. That goes a long way with building relationships too, because not everyone in this business knows who everyone is.

How Do You Get an Honest Picture of What’s Happening at Your Locations?

Jeff Yates: With our ability to provide onsite, real-time visibility into your facilities, we’re giving that through an unbiased set of eyes, somebody with no skin in the game. One of our largest customers actually built language into an RFP so that we’d be at their facilities a minimum of three or four times a year, plus some surprise visits throughout the year, with that cost shared amongst them and their vendor partners. That program gave them proactive visibility, and it also let them gather data to score those vendors. They started with eight regional and national vendor partners and were able to narrow that down to four, based on who was actually performing well.

Does Bringing Vendor Work In-House Actually Save Money?

Donnie Geyer: Internally, our store ops partners are probably our biggest opportunity, and in the last nine months we’ve actually been able to grow. We brought on three new people to elevate our level of service and connect with the stores more frequently. We had external resources supporting the stores, and we were leveraging that so much it actually became cost effective to bring those resources internally. The business case ended up being about a fifteen percent cost savings, plus we got dedicated people who were part of the brand and understood the stores instead of an outsourced model. We were also going through an RFP on the service side at the same time, so some of those savings helped offset what we were doing by adding headcount.

Are RFPs the Cost-Saving Lever Operators Assume They Are?

Catherine Barnes: I think there’s a misconception that when you go out to RFP, you’re going to find savings all the time. I’d actually say it’s the opposite, because if you haven’t gone out to market in three years, the prices have changed drastically. So there are ways you have to approach it. Are you bundling services? Are you going out to providers that can do multiple trades, so you can get those specific trades down in price rather than going to individual organizations that just do plumbing or just do HVAC? When you have a smaller team managing facilities, the supplier base has to be smaller too, but those vendors almost become an extension of your team. It really depends on your organization and how many people you have to manage the program.

Where Is Vendor Spend Actually Leaking?

Catherine Barnes: At a previous organization, I went looking for savings in an area nobody had questioned in years, which was floor care. The perception was that the vendor was totally responsible for the space looking good all the time. When I had regionals check the vendor’s own equipment between scheduled visits, we found out they weren’t actually doing the daily cleaning in between. So we created a program to make sure it was happening, and it turned out that daily upkeep on the operations side could save us seven million dollars. If I can get operations buy-in on that, it means we can take that money and put it into HVAC replacements, into the assets we actually need to be putting it into instead of a service like floor care.

There’s so much cost savings when operations does the right thing. We have so much waste with a dispatch system that goes straight to suppliers when the wrong trade is selected or the wrong description is put in, and a truck rolls only to be told they don’t do that. So having the right suppliers in place, and having operations confirm a repair actually happened, is where a lot of that hidden cost lives.

What Are Experienced Operators Watching to Stay Ahead?

Donnie Geyer: I think the biggest thing is the relationships. We partner with our vendor partners and have these bi-weekly conversations to stay on top of what’s really happening in the industry, and also with our peers. I try and insulate my team from all the spin and noise so they can focus on their role and the service level.

Jeff Yates: As the climate changes, our customers’ needs change, so we rely heavily on their buying motives as well as their feedback to understand what we need to be providing. When I get feedback from customers based on what they need, I can take that straight to our dev team and figure out a way to build it.

Steve Vollrath: Control what you can control and stay focused in that area. There’s a lot of information being shared through media sources, and what we’re finding is we’re not necessarily seeing what we’re hearing out there. So we just continue to engage with our clients, gather that information, and understand what we can do if we need to change or mobilize.

Catherine Barnes: Understanding what their needs are, looking at their reports, what they’re seeing when they go into locations. And then going to supplier partners and asking, what are you all seeing in the industry, is this about right, are there any opportunities. It’s not a one-way conversation, it’s a two-way conversation. What can we do better for each other?

What Will Set the Next Wave of Facilities Leaders Apart?

Steve Vollrath: Folks who are really engaging and looking to continue to learn. If you stay in your ways and aren’t open to gathering information and engaging, you’re going to stay where you are. You’ve got to continue to have an open mind and get comfortable with new ideas and new tools.

Donnie Geyer: Those who partner and communicate really well. Being transparent, whether it’s with peers, our store ops partners, our internal teams, whatever. I think in bigger companies that communication gets lost a lot between facilities, real estate, and other departments. When you have great internal and external partners and you’re really communicating on what’s happening, that makes everybody better.

Jeff Yates: Those who are open, open to change, open communication, open to feedback. As a leader it’s easy to have your blinders on and continue down the same path even as change is happening, and if that’s what you do, you’re going to be in a world of hurt.

Catherine Barnes: Being an authentic leader. Letting your team know that you’re in the same space as them, but leading them through it and protecting them from what you can. Making sure you’re constantly recognizing them, and letting them know you’re there because of them.

Where Fexa Fits Into This

The operational thread running under all four conversations is the same one Fexa customers act on every day: fewer, better-vetted vendor relationships, backed by real data instead of assumptions about who’s actually delivering. That’s the core of R&M Spend Optimization with Fexa, and it’s exactly where facilities teams find room to redirect budget toward the capital needs that matter more.

If your team is still relying on scattered systems and guesswork to manage vendor performance across locations, request a demo to see how Fexa gives multi-site operators the kind of visibility this panel spent an hour talking about.